It is doing something. It is holding the value of whatever work you exchanged for it, and it will probably still be holding that value in thirty years. It is also, as Martin Matejka points out, doing almost nothing else.
"You can have a nice visual experience," he says. "But that's pretty much it."
Matejka co-founded Firefish, a non-custodial Bitcoin-backed lending marketplace, with Igor Neumann. The company connects borrowers and investors directly, with loan agreements enforced through on-chain escrow rather than through a balance sheet you have to trust. Borrowers keep control of their Bitcoin. That is the product. But the argument underneath it is the more interesting thing, and it starts with the cabinet.
"We used to treat Bitcoin in the same way," he says. "Imagine you could, if you need, access the value that is accumulated in your gold or in your Bitcoin, for a productive use. Be it scaling your company, good education for your kids, or some other cool use case. If your savings are sitting idle, the store of value doesn't use its full potential."
This is a more provocative claim than it first sounds. Storing value is the use case Bitcoin has actually won. Matejka's position is that winning it is only half the job.
He did not arrive here from crypto. He arrived from economics, and then from the least romantic corner of institutional finance.
"Economics was my major, and Austrian economics was the area I was really interested in," he says. "Believe it or not, people have been talking about sound money long before Bitcoin. We've been thinking about free banking and gold and how we could create a better financial system, or to some extent come back to a better financial system."
The route there was disillusionment. "As an economics student, when you engage with neoclassical economics, sooner or later you realise it doesn't make much sense. It's a lot of random concepts picked up from different economic theories, put together, mixed together, and pretending it makes sense. It doesn't."